In addition to having a slight obsession with match-3 games, I’ve been known to love a good resource management game, too. Barn Yarn was a recent favorite of mine, but I’ve found myself missing some older games linked to a certain social networking site. 

There’s something satisfying to me about collecting animals and objects to decorate with. I stumbled across Disco Zoo, which looked like a great alternative – I can download to my tablet and phone and indulge my guilty pleasure without required social interactions!

Disco Zoo is exactly what you would expect from the name – a zoo, full of animals, which throws the occasional disco party to liven things up. You build your zoo by going on expeditions to rescue animals from various habitats.

Rescue missions take you to a 5x5 square in which you need to uncover the animal in order to add to your zoo. Each board indicates at the top which animals you might be able to uncover and tracks your progress as you turn over individual squares and find animals.

Each animal has its own pattern – some are 4 in a straight line or diagonal some are 3 or 4 off-center.  It’s helpful to remember which pattern each animal hides in so when you uncover one square you have a better chance of finding the rest of the animal before you run out of turns. 

Each rescue mission allows you 10 attempts to find the animals. If you uncover part of an animal but not all pieces before you run out of attempts, you can use in-game currency called Discobux (no, I’m not kidding) to purchase more moves. If you’re cheap like I am, you can also chose to watch a short video to earn 5 more attempts. The videos are brief and advertise other tablet games available for download.

As you rescue animals, you add them to your Disco Zoo to keep your patrons happy. Each animal will earn a certain number of coins per minute, which allows you to purchase more chances to go on a rescue mission.

Unlike some resource management games you don’t have to harvest the animals in order to earn the coins, they are added to your bank automatically. The animals will fall asleep so at some point your zoo will stop earning coins until you go back in to wake them all up.

The highlight of the game is throwing a disco party in the zoo – the animals and patrons all dance and a fun disco ball spreads brightly colored lights all around the property.

Even the construction workers get their groove on when the disco ball goes up. Your Disco Zoo earns double coins during the party, so it’s a great way to boost your bank to be able to rescue more animals.

Disco Zoo was a light-hearted and enjoyable game, if a little mindless and boring. The game starts off fairly slow, as it takes a while to earn enough coins to go on rescue missions and add animals to the zoo. 

Quite a bit of time is spent just rescuing animals then waiting for them to earn you enough coins to go back and get more. Luckily the patrons will give you donations as they’re browsing your zoo, but pick them up quickly or they disappear.

You will also get some bonuses (a school bus full of kids just bought all your ice cream, old ladies cleaned out the gift shop, etc.) that help to increase your bank of coins. I was somewhat frustrated with how slowly the game advanced. I’ve added probably 25 – 30 animals, yet I’m still more than 30 animals away from qualifying for the third level of animal rescue. I guess that’s the developers way of encouraging you to play more, but it might just make me give up as it seems an unattainable goal unless I want to devote every waking hour to Disco Zoo.